Terms, privacy and sources.

Earshot SF (“the Service”, “we”, “us”) is a sole proprietorship based in San Francisco, California, and is not affiliated with any government agency. By using the Service you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

The Service is offered from and intended for use in the United States. It covers one American city, is priced in US dollars and is not directed to people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland; we do not offer or market it to them.

What the Service is

The Service takes a San Francisco address and reports publicly recorded features near it that are associated with sound: fire and police stations, hospitals with emergency rooms, schools, Muni stops and lines, cable car lines, freeway ramps, construction permits, repeated noise complaints, licensed entertainment and amplified sound venues, and recurring event venues. For each it reports what the record is, whether it is very close or close, and the time-of-day pattern the record implies.

What the Service is not

• It is not a measurement. Nothing in a report is a decibel reading, a predicted noise level or an acoustic survey. Every flag is a proximity or pattern signal drawn from a public record.
• It is not complete. It reports what its sources contain; see What this does not cover, below.
• It is not current to the minute. Each check is refreshed on its own schedule, weekly to quarterly, and every entry shows the date of the data behind it. Records can be wrong or out of date at their source.
• It is not professional advice. It is not real estate, legal, financial, medical or environmental advice, and it is not a substitute for visiting a property at different times of day, a professional inspection, or a landlord's or seller's disclosures.

No warranty

The Service and all reports are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. We do not warrant that reports are accurate, complete or error-free, or that the Service will be uninterrupted.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data or goodwill, arising from your use of the Service, including any decision to rent, buy or decline a property. Our total liability for any claim arising from the Service is limited to the greater of the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US$5. This applies whether you used the free check or bought a report. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Fair housing and acceptable use

Reports describe places and public records, never the people associated with them. You agree not to use the Service, or any report, to discriminate against any person, or to steer any person toward or away from a neighbourhood, on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability or any other characteristic protected by federal, California or San Francisco law. You also agree not to:

• scrape, bulk-query or automate access to the Service;
• resell, redistribute or publish reports, or anything compiled from them, as a dataset, ranking or service of your own;
• present a report as a professional inspection, an acoustic survey or a disclosure required by law;
• use the Service in a way that breaches the terms of the data sources listed under Sources and licences.

Your responsibility

If you breach the acceptable-use terms above and someone brings a claim against us because of it, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with that claim, including legal fees.

What you receive

A report is delivered as a PDF, emailed to you at the address you give when you pay. That file is the report you bought: it is fixed as of the day it was issued, and it says so on its first page. The records behind it keep changing — permits close, new ones are issued, complaint patterns move — so the site will show a different report for the same address later on. There is no account and no login, and we do not keep a copy of your report. The address it is for is kept only in Stripe’s record of your payment, together with a note of the data it was built from; if you lose the file, email contact@earshotsf.com and we will re-issue the same report from that record.

Payment and refunds

A full report costs US$20. Reports are sold individually through Stripe, which handles your card details; we never receive or store them. The price is shown before you pay, and there is no subscription or recurring charge. You accept these terms at checkout. If you are not satisfied with a report, ask and we will refund it, no questions asked.

Your use of a report

The Service, its text and the arrangement of its reports are ours; the underlying public records are not. A report you buy is licensed to you for your own use, which includes showing or forwarding it to people involved in your own housing decision, such as a partner, agent or landlord.

Changes and termination

We may change or discontinue the Service and may update these terms. Material changes will be posted here with a new date and will not apply to a report already bought. We may refuse or end access for anyone breaching these terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute will be heard in the state or federal courts located in San Francisco County.

Informational only, and not a measurement. Flags are drawn from public records and describe what is near an address, not how loud it is. They are recommended to be verified in person, at the times of day that matter to you.

• No accounts. You do not register, and we do not ask for your name.
• The address you enter is sent to Mapbox to find where it is, and is used to build your report. It is held in memory for up to 30 minutes so one visit does not look it up twice, and it is not stored in a database.
• One cookie: an opaque random id that exists only for that 30-minute reuse. It carries nothing about you and expires after 30 minutes.
• Our host, Vercel, keeps ordinary request logs for operation and security, which can include IP addresses and the pages requested.
• If you buy a report, Stripe processes the payment under its own privacy policy and holds your email address, your card details and the address the report is for. We receive a confirmation of payment, the email address and the report's address, which we use to make the report, send it to you and send it again if you ask. We keep no copy of our own.
• The report is emailed to you through our email provider, Resend, under its own privacy policy.
• We use no analytics, advertising or tracking services, and we do not sell or share personal information.

To ask about or delete anything we hold about you, email contact@earshotsf.com.

Reports are built from public data. Each entry names its source and the date it was retrieved. Your use of the Service is also subject to those sources’ terms.

• City and County of San Francisco open data (DataSF): building permits and building inspections, SF Public Works street-use permits, SF311 cases, Entertainment Commission permits, registered business locations, schools, city facilities and the city's address register.
• SFMTA transit schedule data (GTFS), used under the SFMTA Transit Data License Agreement; its required disclaimer is below.
• © OpenStreetMap contributors: rail track and freeway ramp geometry, and the locations of a few places no address can place, used under the Open Database License (ODbL). The map's citywide layer carries this notice in the file itself, and any derivative database made from that geometry must be offered under the same licence.
• State of California: licensed healthcare facility listings (Department of Health Care Access and Information), the public and private school directories (Department of Education), and authorized farmers markets.
• The US Census Bureau's geocoder, for locating some listed places.
• Mapbox, for maps and for locating the address you enter. Map attribution appears on every map.

SFMTA disclaimer

The SFMTA provides the Data to Licensee on an “as is” and “as available” basis. The SFMTA makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the Data. SFMTA does not warrant that Data will be error-free and assumes no responsibility for anyone’s use of the information. The SFMTA disclaims all warranties in the Data and any application that uses the Data, whether express or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. A Licensee and any third party that accesses or uses the Data or uses any application produced or provided by the Licensee that uses the Data does so at its own risk and assumes all liability arising from the use of the Data or an application that uses the Data.

The Licensee agrees that the SFMTA and its employees, officers, directors and agents shall not be liable for damages of any kind arising from the use of Data or any application that uses the Data including but not limited to direct, indirect, incidental, punitive and consequential, and or special damages.

In the SFMTA’s text, “Licensee” is the operator of this Service and “Data” is SFMTA’s transit data.

Clause 12 of the same licence requires the following notice on any version of its data we prepare. The transit stop, light rail and cable car records in a report are such a version:

Reproduced with permission granted by the City and County of San Francisco. The information has been provided by means of a nonexclusive, limited, and revocable license granted by the City and County of San Francisco.

The City and County of San Francisco does not guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, completeness or usefulness of any information. The City and County of San Francisco provides this information “as is,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, and assumes no responsibility for anyone’s use of the information.

Trademarks

Muni and SFMTA are trademarks of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and its licence does not permit their use alongside its data. Reports therefore do not use them: a stop is a “transit stop”, a Metro line is a “light rail line” identified by its letter, and the agency is named only where these terms and a report’s source line identify who published the data, as that licence requires. This Service is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by the SFMTA or the City and County of San Francisco.

A check that comes back clear means nothing was found in the sources above, not that nothing is there.

• The sources are San Francisco agencies, the State of California and OpenStreetMap. Records held by neighbouring cities and counties are not included, so an address near the southern county line will not see, for example, a Daly City fire station.
• Sound that no agency records will not appear: a neighbour's dog, a rooftop compressor, a venue without a permit or registration.
• A permit records work that is authorized, not work that is happening on site today.
• Noise complaints reflect how often people report, not verified events. A cluster's address is where a complaint was reported, not the source of the noise.
• Venue hours are not recorded by any source. Only a venue holding an extended-hours permit is described as able to open late.
• Nothing here is an acoustic measurement, and the very close and close bands are working distances, not measured ones.

If a report says something about a place or a business that you believe is wrong, email contact@earshotsf.com with the address you searched and the specific record.

We acknowledge every request within one business day, and at the same time remove the disputed record from every report, before we check it. We then check it against the public record it came from, and aim to tell you the outcome within five business days. A removed record returns only if that public record clearly supports it. Because the data comes from public agencies, a record that is wrong at its source may also need correcting with that agency; we will tell you which one. We keep a record of every request and what we did about it.